Simple sulfur-olefins as new promising chiral ligands for asymmetric catalysis

Since 2003, the discovery of chiral dienes as steering ligands in asymmetric processes has opened the field of chiral chelating olefin catalysis. However, despite the impressive advances, the development of readily accessible and catalytically promising chiral olefins has been much less successful. In very recent years, chiral sulfur-containing olefins have emerged as a new exciting class of hybrid ligands for asymmetric catalysis. This article summarizes our efforts in developing extremely simple chiral sulfur-olefins as ligands for a variety of transition-metal-catalyzed asymmetric transformations, and the recent progress by other groups in the design and use of sulfinamide- or sulfoxide-based olefins in asymmetric catalysis.